The Numbers Game of Selling Art

The
Numbers Game of Selling Art

The Numbers Game of Selling Art

Every
week I write a brand new article for members of our four wonderful art groups
on Facebook, The Artists Directory, The Artists Lounge, The Artists Exchange,
and The Artist Hangout. This week we look at a handful of strategies that might
give you an edge when selling your work. Talking of edges…

My week to date…

As many of you already know, I am
currently in a battle of wits with a 1.4cm kidney stone.Yes, that will be centimetres and not
millimetres. I know kidney stones aren’t related to art but seriously, you have
so got to know that kidney stones are like some really bad movie that never
deserves a sequel. Yet here I am having had a dozen or more of the things and I
can categorically say that they don’t get any easier.

I’m not even sure how to describe
them anymore. Kidney stones are like a Brexit negotiation. There's lots of
hanging around, the promise of a brighter future, and no one can decide on the
best possible course of action. You wish it was all over either way and you
just want the madness to stop and go back to the way things were before the
pain. The moment when you think something might happen a plot twist happens and
the whole painful process starts again. For those who are lucky enough to have
yet to be indoctrinated to the wonders of Brexit and need an analogy to explain
it better, it’s a bit like when Geri Halliwell overestimated her viability as a
solo artist and left the Spice Girls.

When the stones eventually come out,
their few millimetres of spikiness laughs at you in a way that says ‘I caused
you, pain human, you are insignificant’. This one, it’s not coming out
naturally, it is going to need some qualified adult supervision and an
anaesthetic. I expect that rather than it laughing at me, its look will be
quite sinister and it will say, I told you I will be back.

So before we continue with this week’s
article I just wanted to say a massive thank you for all the well wishes and
support and for the love everyone has shown and I especially want to say thank
you to those who have been busy keeping my Facebook page alive by sharing my
work. You absolutely and truly are stars and I cannot even begin to thank you
enough.

Now let’s get back to the article you
really should have been reading last week before a kidney stone decided to come
out and play preventing me from pressing the upload button, and as usual, there will be a few of my recent artworks scattered
throughout for you too!

The Art World is Many Things…

The artworld is many things and
comprises of many markets, so what we go through today is going to have to be
broad in the broadest of broadest senses. The strategies we look at today will make
sense to some but for others who work in some areas of the art market, these
strategies might not work at all, though generally, I have tried to focus on
those that will stand a better chance of working across a good cross-section of
the art world.

The good news is that you aren’t the
first great artist to know the struggle of figuring out how and where to sell
your work. Many others have been there before and I think it would be fair to
say that even the most well-known and commercially successful artists have had
to go through this at some point. But there are some general principles and
practices that for centuries have provided art sellers with a way to get work
onto the commercial ladder and sometimes we have to consider that the old
school way of doing things is worth a shot too.

The most difficult things beyond exposing our art that we have
to do as artists are to market and sell our work. How do I sell more art, is one
of the most frequently asked questions I hear from artists. Looking through
Google Trends it seems as if even more people are asking the question now than
ever before as you can see in this very quick trend search I carried out.

Google Trends - A tool you should be using more!

There’s really no one size fits all
secret formula and selling art is no different today than it was hundreds of
years ago. What has changed are the ways we buy and consume art and they have
changed dramatically even in the past decade alone. Today we have the best
tools we have ever had to help us sell our work, the internet, social media,
global markets within reach of almost everyone, but when we look back through
art history the tools might have changed but the process behind selling art hasn’t
changed that much at all. The same core principles that sold art in the past
are the same principles in play today and which are used by art sales
professionals all around the world.

We rely on marketing technology way
too much…

This issue today is that marketing
has become easier and to an extent, that’s also made things a lot harder.
Firstly, everyone is a marketer on the internet, everyone wants to be ‘the
brand’ even when they’re fresh out of kindergarten and without a real clue as
to what adult life will eventually throw towards them. While there is every
point in having dreams and aspirations, there is something else that has to be
considered and that is, if you want to be famous on Insta or YouTube, so do
millions of others and the same is true of trying to become some rock-star-level successful artist.

There are lots of visual artists who
make a commercial success of what they do, even if they never achieve rock-star
levels of fame and fortune. But there are many that don’t get past first base
who never quite set out with a plan a, let alone a plan-b that will navigate
the heady waters ahead. Many unprepared artists will fail purely because they
forget or even ignore the basic entrepreneurial skills that are needed to underpin
any business.

The ones that make it are the ones
that can either buy it (we do have to be honest here) or they earn it by
thinking every move through and putting in the work. I am undoubted that some
also have a sprinkling of excessively great luck and in some instances,
serendipity plays a pivotal role too. The most successful will have recognised
that new skills have to be learned along the way and they will have taken some
time out to learn some of the broader skills they need beyond knowing how to
handle a paintbrush. I will come on to that a little later.

There are more artists today than at any
time before, and whilst the modern tools are there to be used, what we often
forget is that tools such as the internet are tools that can only support our
marketing strategies, they’re not the physical marketing strategies. I have the
internet is not the strategy, it is merely a tool to use to help you reach whatever
goals are in that strategy. The internet makes life easier but it cannot do
everything for you, there have to be multiple action sequences made on your
part.

It’s
a little like when you hear the phrase, ‘my Wi-Fi is really slow today’ when
the chances are that whoever says that really means that their internet is slower
than usual and that the overhead of running wirelessly is causing some latency,
or the external internet backbone is being crippled by a thousand different
problems.

Their Wi-Fi is probably fine because
Wi-Fi isn’t the internet. The issue is more likely to be that the external
internet is probably out of whack and that’s a very different problem. While
you are chasing your tail changing settings in the dark and with no hope of ever
fixing it, unknown to you, the data centres are probably being rebooted and new
cables are being laid and the problem will be being resolved at its core.

The point here is that we too often misidentify
where the problems really sit when it comes to marketing and business and that makes
diagnosing them difficult, and resolving them successfully, practically
impossible. A few months ago my friend reached out to me to say that his
organic reach on social media had declined by almost twenty-thousand views
which he had managed to resolve, but not before he had succumbed to paying to
boost multiple ads, spending a fortune and then figuring out that his organic
reach was down because he had restricted the audience in the settings on his
last dozen posts. He went for the obvious fix not realising that making his
posts public again would have got him his reach back.

We put way too much trust in technology and
believe it will do everything needed to get us from point a, to point b. The
internet doesn’t market our work for us, we have to take actions using the
internet and that usually means a lot of different actions along with a few
that don’t need the internet at all. For some, there might even be complacency in thinking that a social post is all that’s really needed to sell
a lifetime’s portfolio of art, and disappointment slips in when the work
doesn’t sell. A sale like that will happen occasionally, but it is rare and
usually means that there have been many previous contributing actions taken
that have converged together at a single successful point.

I call the problems that you can’t
see, small stars. You can’t always see them with the naked eye but there is
every chance that’s where those challenges come from!

Look for the small stars...

Lesson one in selling more art over.
The internet is a tool, if you want to sell more art you have to step away from
solely relying on the internet and do something that is a little more direct,
and you have to look at the obvious problems first which might only be minor
and easy enough to fix.

Van Gogh…

Van Gogh wasn’t great at marketing
his work. During his lifetime he had managed to sell one piece and you would be
forgiven for thinking that that print on demand services must have been a thing
back then too. Vincent was thought to be the poster boy for great starving
artists, unappreciated during his life which sadly came to an abrupt end at the
age of 37.

Vincent had a brother by the name of
Theo, who did his utmost to promote Vincent’s work and who himself passed away
some six months after his brother’s death.There is no doubt that both had departed too soon and it is remarkable
to think that some of the world’s most famous works would only become famous
after Vincent and his brother had passed away.

There is another myth in the art world that the value of work increases the moment an artist meets their
earthly end, and if that end also happened to be a little brutal or dramatic,
well, that really helps to sell the work too because nothing screams look at me like a little drama.

Surprisingly, and rather sadly,
artists who didn’t do that much when they were alive are no more likely to sell
any work when they’re no longer around than they did when they were alive. Not
that is, unless their work gets discovered or goes on to be promoted in the
same way that successful living artists get discovered and promoted. Someone
has to buy into that artwork otherwise it slowly or in some cases, quickly
fades away and becomes lost. The only plus for a deceased artist is that they
now at least have scarcity on their side.

It wasn’t until Johanna Van
Gogh-Bonger, inherited around 200 of Van Gogh’s paintings that the world began
to find out just who Van Gogh was, and because she was entrepreneurial, she
began to loan the works out to those in the art world who were important and
had credibility. Between 1892 and 1900, she organised twenty exhibits of the
work and offered 10-15 percent commissions to dealers who could sell or place
the art in museums. You can read more about Johanna on Wikipedia, right here.

She went even further than placing
the artwork and translated many of the letters that had been written between
Vincent and Theo into English and she did one of the things that so many
artists of today dread, she stepped out of her comfort zone and began to
network. The result was a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
which gave the credibility to Vincent’s art that was needed. The work was then
used as examples when H.P. Bremmer who was an art educationalist gave lessons
on modern art and because Bremmer was respected and had the credibility needed
to influence sales of artworks, he was able to place some of those works
amongst the wealthiest individuals in the Netherlands who were also his
students.

One of Bremmer’s students, Helene
Kröller-Müller who was married to Anton Kröller the industrialist had the wealth which gave her the opportunity to purchase hundreds of works (a mixture
of both drawings and paintings although the exact number is debatable) on the
basis of the advice she received from Bremmer. She also happened to be an influencer,
yes, influencers were around pre-internet days too, and Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger
published three volumes of Vincent and Theo’s letters and continued to build on
Vincent’s reputation when she moved to New York where she ultimately managed to
get Vincent’s Sunflowers painting placed into the National Gallery in London. Eventually, Johanna’s son carried on the work his mother had been doing through
the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation.

The point here is that selling art
today is little different to how it was sold back in the days of Van Gogh. If
anything it has been made easier with the advent of communication and the
internet, but the basic principles of selling art today are still the same
regardless. You have to do something to make it happen that is often so far out
of your comfort zone because despite what they say, art doesn’t sell itself.

So this week we will take a step
outside of our comfort zones and give you a few ideas on how you can hopefully improve on
your sales history.

Become an entrepreneur…

Being an entrepreneur isn’t just
about raising and lowering prices at the right time and finding quick wins, it
is about having the knowledge behind you that allows you to make sustainable
business decisions over the long term, over and over again and to an extent,
making mistakes over and over again too. It’s a cliché to suggest that you need
to fail quickly, but as long as you learn something from failing then you do
have to fail quickly and repeatedly. The real key to being able to move forward is
to learn.

When we read about the top
entrepreneurs in business such as Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, we find that they
were voracious consumers of knowledge who would spend about five hours a week
learning about business.We so often
hear of the one percent who only ever hang out with others from the one percent because they share the same culture, and artists would do well to have that
same kind of community with each other too. Peer learning is a powerful way to
gain insight and education in the business that no art school can provide. This
is the reason I set up the Artists Lounge Facebook group. It is a group where
the focus isn’t on selling artworks but discussing art and the business of art,
what works, and what doesn’t, although sadly of late people do seem to see it
as just another hey, I can post art here too group but I am working on that, although I am beginning to wonder if people ever read what a group is about before they join!

Stop with the excuses!

You are an artist, that’s a brave
first step. It takes guts and courage to bare your art and your soul to the
world and that’s the biggest obstacle you will ever have to face. The other
obstacles are just minor inconveniences compared to the guts it takes to show
your work but they’re also often excuses.

Social media is hard, but it’s easier
than doing what Johanna did. If you’re not selling then you’re more than likely
not finding your tribe, the problem is that you will never find your tribe if they
don’t know you exist and those who don’t go on social media which is quite a chunk of humanity are missing out entirely. You proved you have the
confidence when you showed the world what you are capable of, but sometimes you
just have to get on with the job and put that lack of confidence to one side
and stretch your presence out beyond the digital yonder.

Make a plan and change the
plan...

You won’t navigate far if you have no
map. The art world has a difficult topography at the best of times, with lots
of winding roads and dead ends. Choose the place you want to get to and just
go, and if you have to stop at the next junction and navigate a new path, the
solution is to change direction and carry on again, quickly or slowly, step by
step, one at a time. Sometimes you might have to take a step back, but any step
you take that keeps you moving is a step worth taking and that includes the
backward steps. A step is a step no matter which direction it takes you.
Getting there takes doing, not thinking about doing or thinking about never
getting there.

How many people really update their
sat-nav devices every time the manufacturer releases a brand new map? Maybe
more do today than they once did but often we still run a map or two behind the
latest. They still get us to the destination, just a little more slowly.
Sometimes they make us look as if we are driving through fields when we know we
are driving on a brand new road, but we know that we are heading in the right
direction and we can see another road ahead on the screen. That’s like having a
plan and any plan that shows the waypoints between start and finish is
something that will help you to navigate through the mud.

The best artists are masters...

Sure, Van Gogh was a master but it
took Johanna to get his work on the road to getting sold. Creativity looks easy
enough but sometimes. it is all a very carefully staged illusion.

Behind the painting, the artist might
have had their own personal inner battles to deal with, they might be holding
down multiple jobs, they might not be feeling well or coping well, and while
they’re painting they might have to draw from deep within to produce what they
produce based on past experiences that might not always be positive. This is
often what makes their works so powerful and even if there are no such inner
battles going on, the artist will always need Olympian levels of determination
and grit to get anywhere.

As an artist, I can categorically say
from experience that no matter how much you love art, you have to always put
yourself first. Feeling unwell, take time to recover, stop handing out
unrealistic deadlines for commissions, save those moments of madness until you
are back in the zone. This is something I have been learning over the past
couple of weeks while I have been attempting to ignore my kidney stone.
Eventually, I switched everything from work to social media down a notch. Be a
master in your art by all means, but be a master of you too.

No more excuses...

It’s more than a marathon...

Artists work for years, sometimes
decades, sometimes an entire lifetime before they see success. Forget the fast
sprint, forget that it’s even close to a marathon, art can feel like you are
participating in a decathlon every day. Artists work long hours and works can
take months and sometimes even years to reach completion, others might take
twenty-minutes.

Sometimes art and the business of art
is momentarily easier but the processes to selling it remain the same, and yet I
see many artists who undervalue their work based on this epic lie that the
piece was easy to produce. It wasn’t too long ago when I visited a show and
overheard an artist talking to a potential client who was asking if one of the
works could be discounted, not insignificantly either. The same potential
client asked something that completely blew my mind, do I get a discount
because I watched you paint it earlier and it only took you 20-minutes, and besides, you
said that using those paints made life easier.

What that client hadn’t seen was the
twenty years of learning, practice and skill-building that got the artist to the
point of creating something as beautiful in twenty minutes, or the multiple
practice attempts that may have been done to carry out a live painting
demonstration, or the fact that by my reckoning and knowing that the paint
being used wasn’t exactly cheap that the cost of the paints alone wouldn’t have
been covered from what the buyer wanted to pay. The artist did what many wouldn't and declined the offer.

The best thing an artist can ever do
is to remove the word ‘easy’ from their vocabulary especially when a client is
nearby. The easier moments are just a welcome relief from the moments when
inspiration and sales are hiding away, and besides, if it really is that easy,
I’ll lend you a brush.

While we’re on the subject of
devaluing work, if I had a dollar for every promise of great exposure I would
be given if I gave a piece of art away for free, I would be pretty darn close
to being rich on one hand and bankrupt on the other. Tactically these free jobs
have to be picked really selectively and that’s if you pick any at all. They
have their place but there have to be hard limits and you should never feel you
have to say yes because you find it awkward to say no.

I always make a few exceptions, if an artist needs help I’m never going to walk away, and there are charities that I
support who I know would appreciate the value of anything, and I still plan on
making some free art available on my portfolio site. Those reasons are either
because it is about doing what is right or they’re strategic, but what they’re not, is to
just furnish someone’s ego so that they can say that they came in under budget or get a free print or original for their lounge.

Never in the history of ever have the majority of working artists ever gotten
anywhere near enough great exposure from giving away free work. Great exposure
is like some junk currency that might have had some value once, but today it’s rated lower than the UK pound.

Free giveaways are usually good at
getting some engagement on social media but again, and the same applies with
heavy discounting, these are things that should be tactical and strategically
decided on and used sparingly, never every day. In my experience with offering
deep discounts, I think I have only ever just about broken even in terms of time
and money and sometimes I have taken a loss.When offering daily or weekly discounts becomes the norm, buyers wait
around for the discount to be applied to the art they want and the problem that
artists have with this approach when they work with print on demand is that
they have no way to know what someone might be interested in until the time
they buy it.

Money... also known as art supply tokens

Work out your pricing model and stick
to it…

Another consideration is pricing
because this is something that can make or break art sales. The price you set
might be too high or too low, and pricing yourself out of the market or
undervaluing your work never helps sales.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge
for many artists and there are many formulas kicking around on the internet
which will give you an idea of what other artists might be using. The problem
is that those prices are generally based on a specific market, in a specific
location or through certain resellers. Add to that the other hundreds of
factors that need to be considered when setting prices such as, experience, the
number of shows you have entered, the number of major exhibition wins and
awards, and of course, the type of mediums used and the time and skill needed.

I have never found a formula online
that is guaranteed to work for every type of art and every type of artist in
every type of location. Ultimately with whatever artwork, whether it was
painted by Matisse or your next-door neighbour, it is only ever going to be
worth what the market is willing to pay so unless you get to know your market
or have an idea about what market you ideally want to engage with, pricing will
always be the Achilles heel for a lot of artists.

The art world can never be accused of
being transparent which makes it even more problematic to come up with a price
that is exactly comparable. There are some sales listings available online but
none of those listings covers every artwork ever sold and certainly not for every
artist. Artists tend to be protective of their pricing models to protect their
buyers and collectors and galleries even more so. There are some signs that the
veil is beginning to be lifted but it will still be a while before we start to
see any major shift, there’s a huge pushback from some major galleries.

Whatever you do charge has to be
justifiable because there will be a time when you need to explain why your art
is worth what you are asking for it. If you are represented then the gallery
will usually determine the retail price and they will negotiate the discounts
they can apply with you which takes out a lot of the hassle that comes with
figuring out what to charge. But the issue for many artists is that they’re not
working in a represented space such as a gallery.

The ideal is if you already know
exactly who your tribe are and what they are willing to pay. Going in blind and
setting prices at a certain price point will limit you to the people who buy at
whatever price point that is, and the people who buy at that specific price
point become your target market. The question is then whether or not you manage
to recruit buyers who usually buy at that point.

I think it might have been either
last year or the year before when I visited a show and saw for the first time a
thousand dollar open edition giclee print. It wasn’t huge, something like
twenty-four inches by eighteen inches and was signed by the artist. Remember
that this was an open edition, unframed, and here’s the jaw-dropper, the artist
had been creating art for six-months and had a queue of buyers lining up.

An artist on the next stand also had
thousand dollar prints, all small limited editions, signed and numbered, the
prints were framed and technically the artwork was significantly more skillful
than the other seller. No queue and from what I could see, no sales, and by the
end of the day he had reduced his prices.

The difference is that the thousand
dollars open edition print guy knew exactly who his market was and he knew the subject they wanted to buy and it turned out that he had been studying
marketing in college, every Tuesday evening for two years. Before that, he was
the guy who would queue up to buy the thousand dollars open edition print.

Asking friends for help with pricing
is a step you could take but the risks are that the answers you get will be the
answers you want to hear. Ask someone in the industry for a reasonable
appraisal of what the art is worth and the answer they give might not be the
answer you want and the chances are that you will disagree with them and go
with your over or underpriced gut instinct instead. I see this quite a lot
when I am asked to provide an appraisal. The difficulty for anyone appraising
art though is that they have to understand so much about you and your art and
they have to know your part of the market.

I finally figured my pricing out for
my traditional art only after I had started to figure out the kind of person
who would buy it. Much of the homework was then about meeting that kind of a person at shows and observing what people were buying in galleries and to an
extent, online. Print pricing is much more difficult because there are a lot of
variables but one thing I have picked up through experience is that you do have
to keep everything consistently priced no matter which platform you are selling
on.

Art buyers do their homework and I
certainly found this with prints too, most buyers are savvy enough to know that
artists work across multiple print-on-demand platforms and if one platform is
running an offer that makes similar quality work available for less, that’s
where the buyers will go. In my experience, a buyers loyalty is with the artist
not necessarily the print on demand service but the print on demand services
protect their interests by not sharing any details of buyers with the artist.

The best way of finding a price to
put on your art is always going to be hinged on finding your tribe, finding out
where your art sits and figuring out what your tribe will be willing to pay.

If you are looking for something that
will give you a very quick foundation in one of the formulas that work well
across multiple art disciplines, here it is!

How pricing works – art supplies cost money, and
creating art takes skill, time, space, utilities, which also cost money. You
need to set a price that covers everything you need to create that piece of
art. That becomes your base cost.

Per piece this might mean that the base cost is higher
than people are willing to pay in some cases, so you need to decide on how many
pieces you will need to sell to cover your entire costs. Forget the profit, for
now, we need to establish the actual cost, and how many you need to sell to
cover all of your costs before we look at profit. The important thing here is
that we have a base cost set because that will at least cover materials.

Next, we need to figure out what our people will pay.
Here’s where it becomes infinitely trickier because unless you know who your
people are, there’s no real sense of what they might be willing to pay. This is
why figuring out step ones base costs is so vital. The important thing again is
that you don’t lose money from the off if you can avoid it.

Everyone will buy art for very different reasons, some
for the aesthetics, some because they actually like or even love the art, and
some will think that art from any artist is a great investment opportunity. Trust
me, you can lose money on a Renoir, never buy any art you can’t live with. I
digress, but you do need to ask the
why do people buy my art question, and you definitely need to work out how much
they will pay.

The next bit is all about where you plan to sell it.
The venue even if you are not represented can give you an indication of what
you can add above the base cost. Show your work in a high-end exhibition and
people will be expecting to pay a lot more than if you were showing at a
Saturday morning craft fair. Location is often one of the biggest determining
factors beyond your people.

Finally, be consistent with other artists producing
similar quality works and who have similar histories, skills and sales records,
and within the same subject and material, selling in the same or similar
spaces. Again, the nuances needed to come up with a formula that is perfect for
you are so wide, it becomes difficult until you know what you probably as yet,
don’t know. Make a list of things that could affect what people pay, then think
outside the box, but pricing is one thing that you absolutely always must be is
consistent with regardless of where you sell.

Adrift on Still Waters by Mark Taylor, available now!

Understand the numbers...

Being good at math isn’t one of my
strongest skill sets, I can’t figure out why! Ironic as my day job includes
lots of numbers, algorithms and encryption standards. But numbers are
everywhere in the art world and some need more attention paying to them than
others.

Higher footfall, higher website
traffic, high performing sales histories, they’re all things that are focused
on getting big numbers. But sometimes we focus on the wrong big numbers too.

Take social media as an example. The way algorithms work and bear in mind the
inner workings are never made public, are that they will determine relevancy
through reactions, comments, shares, and mentions. In short, they generally
look at engagement levels and whether or not the context or content goes
against community standards or there are indicators that the post is spam or a
scam.

A page with a million likes might
perform much worse than a page with a thousand likes if 99-percent of your
million number audience isn’t engaged. Whilst it might feel like a nice
problem to have and a million likes would at least see eyeballs landing on your
art, a page of a thousand likes and 50 percent engagement stacks up much better
in the eyes of the algorithm.

Extending organic reach relies on
individual sets of people reacting, sharing and commenting, and generally
engaging with the post. If the engagement is noticed by the algorithm then the
post will be bumped further out to a new set of people and it continues doing
this until engagement begins to dry up. Hence the reason why you might see the
occasional comment on one of your really old posts that triggers a couple more,
and another reason why you should regularly check your old posts to make sure
they’re still relevant.

To counter the effects of
embarrassing posts popping up to haunt timelines some business pages will limit
the visibility of their pages past posts beyond a year or so in order to be
able to better control what people will be commenting and reacting on. This
prevents anything embarrassing or not relevant from making a reappearance which
could do more harm than good to your engagement levels and post reach.

Beyond social media, there is a tendency to focus on big numbers that are simply not realistic, or at least not
well thought through. A sustainable business model for one artist might be to
sell half a dozen paintings a year, for another artist, it might be that they
need to sell hundreds of prints or paintings each year and this again comes
back to having a plan in the first place and that plan has to include knowing what you need to be sustainable.

For the majority of working artists,
the big numbers are really not needed to ensure that there is a sustainable
business model. Much like the million follower page issue, it would be far more
sustainable to have a hundred top fans or collectors of your work who continue
to purchase and buy into whatever you do, that can then become your core
business as you look to expand and create similar more focussed markets.

There are other numbers above and
beyond the sales and hits, numbers are used in marketing all the time yet it’s
something we don’t always notice. Take a look on somewhere like Amazon and
search for analogue watches, notice how most of them will be set at 10:10? This
frames the brand neatly in between the watch hands. But in marketing, it
doesn’t stop there. There are more numbers that you should be paying attention
to.

Don’t go down the rabbit hole without
a torch…

The digital ad agencies who
understand terms such as impressions, CTC, frequency caps and neighbouring
buckets are always focussed on numbers and variables. Their job is to place
adverts in front of the correct demographic and to get results from the ad
campaigns they produce. The good ones tend to be good at doing this, the not so
good ones, well, they’re still going to be doing a better job than anyone who
really doesn’t have the first clue how digital ads work. That’s why I have
always maintained that running social media ads without knowing the intricacies
of what you are doing is mostly a bad idea.

This is why digital ad agencies are
always focused on those terms like impressions and attribution windows,
frequency caps, and neighbouring buckets. Yes, I have no idea what those things
are either, but if you’re not prepared to blow whatever budget you had in mind
to begin with for an ad campaign and you cannot comfortably top that budget up,
ads are really something that needs to be done with some outside help, at least
until you gain a better understanding of what you are doing and you know who
you need to target.

Trust me on this because I ventured
down that rabbit hole once and the rabbit really was some crazy-ass bunny in a
top hat holding a pocket watch. One-off ads is a strategy but again, they’re
not necessarily going to be a good strategy. If you have no idea about who to
target or what you really want your call to action to be, you are just throwing
good money after bad and you will in all likelihood, carry on doing that for a while. I know I did.

Sustain your marketing efforts…

Generally, it’s thought that the rule
of seven is the golden number of times that people need to see something before
they decide to buy it. That’s what many of the books on the subject have to say
but the reality is that the actual number is often a little murkier than that.
Some suggest that the golden number is 13 times, while others suggest 21 times.

People go through phases of not
really paying attention to marketing at the beginning, and it isn’t until the
5th time of seeing an ad or marketing post that they actually pause to take a
look. Some even suggest that by the 7th time, the ad has become an annoyance
and the thirteenth time is when people begin to wonder what they might be
missing out on. By the twentieth time they’ve seen it, there’s a good chance at
that point they might buy into it.

So one of the reasons that you might
not be selling might not be the hundred and fifty reasons you are beating
yourself up about, but because your approach is to post-it and advance to the
next post. There is an art in not appearing to be overly spammy, spreading the post
out not across minutes or even seconds, but instead, over hours, days, weeks, and
months.

There is a fine balance, do you run
the risk of alienating people and them disliking your page or maliciously
reporting the post as spam, or do you instead prepare a longer-term strategy
where you have a post plan that sets out when and where to post. You only have
to find the winning combination once and it can then be used again and again
until it no longer works.

Again, there are plenty of online
resources to help you come up with these strategies but once again, some are
very general. My advice is to take a look at some of the training on offer
through Facebook’s Blue Print website which you can find right here, and Google has a great set of free courses available through their Digital
Garage program which covers digital marketing, data and technology, and career
development and which you can find right here.

Change the venue…

When I finally gave myself permission to test out new points of sale and
to offer some of my prints in retail locations that were not traditional art
selling spaces it began to make a huge difference to sales. It wasn’t something
I had considered doing before, preferring for years to stick with either shows,
art fairs, or online. Offering work through a retailer who didn’t want to
commit to buying in lots of stock and who could order prints as and when they
needed them was one of the best moves I ever made.

Sometimes it’s not so much about following some pre-determined route
defined by some book on the subject, books don’t know who your tribes are any
more than you do, sometimes it is about following what feels right more than
anything else.

If placing your work in a coffee shop feels right for you and your work
that might be your best strategy but you also need to be mindful of where you
might want to end up in the future. The art world purists will see this sort of
placement as something that only beginners do, but here’s the thing, a majority
of working artists today can be commercially successful without going anywhere
near a gallery door. If you do go on to find representation, the choices will
be determined by whoever you are represented by, but as I said earlier, you really
do have to go where your tribe are.

All That Remains by Mark Taylor - Available Now!

It can be
difficult...

There will be
times, when sales might pour or at least trickle through and those times might even
last days, weeks, months, or years, but there will be times when no one is buying
into what you do at all. It was for this reason I originally diversified my
portfolio and included art and graphic designs that served a more regularly
selling market, but that too can carry some risk.

I have always
found the business of art to be one where you often have to be agile enough to
change course, determined enough to hold on, and patient enough to wait it out.
There have definitely been times in my own career where I have overthought
about some of the hurdles I have come across, and times when I haven’t thought
anywhere near enough. The important thing is to never give up and to keep on
moving in any direction you can but don't sweat the wrong numbers!

About
Mark…

I am an artist and blogger and live in
Staffordshire, England. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America
store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com My recent Big Skies collection is now in one place, just look for my collections on the page!

Any art sold through Fine Art America and
Pixels contributes to the ongoing costs of running and developing this
website, ensuring that I can bring you independent advice, tips, and musings, every week for free. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com

Thanks Jane, deeply appreciated. Finally working with a designer this weekend to figure out my new studio space, so looking forward to it after the week of the kidney stone! Hope you have a brilliant weekend! xx

Mark Taylor is a professional artist and blogger who supports other independent visual artists and creatives.
His work is sold online through Fine Art America, Pixels, and Zazzle, and through more than 150 retail locations across the USA, Canada, and the UK